Express delivery

Whether you’re remixing a track using parts supplied from another artist, or sending parts of your own track to another remixer, you need to understand how stems and files should be supplied. Some artists like to send a separate audio bounce of every channel from their session, so loading them into your workstation will give you the entire track from start to finish, broken down into individual channels. This gives the remixer extreme flexibility, allowing individual elements to be isolated and repurposed.

Other artists prefer to condense multiple channels into groups, by mixing down similar channels to stems of ‘submixes’. This reduces the number of files, and retains the original processing used throughout.

Alternatively, some artists just send important loops, one-shots, phrases and even MIDI files in a sort of ‘remix pack’. This gives the remixer all the important sounds from the track, without overwhelming them with unnecessary audio to deal with.

If you’re sending your own files off to be remixed, consider effects such as reverbs and delays. The effects may be essential to the sound, but if you can, have the effects on separate channels (using send/return setups) so the remixer can choose to use them or not.

It’s good practice to name your files with the BPM and key of the track, or include a text file which lists all the important information such BPM, key, sample rate and bit depth.